money

PC Better for Indie Developers Than Xbox Live?

Our friends a Zeboyd games are Indie Developers, and as such they have a limited budget, it is very important for them to choose the platform that best suits their needs and that will turn them the quickest returns. With the overwhelming success of consoles in today gaming market one would assume that developing on a console would be the correct route to go. But is this really the case? Does going to console exclusive or console first then PC really bring you more money? Zeboyd had a very interesting statement on their site.:

“We are pleased to announce that Zeboyd Games has already made more revenue in less than a week on Steam than we have in over a year and a half on the XBox Live Indie Games service.”

Zeboyd made more money, in one week, then they did in an entire year on Xbox Live Arcade. That’s quite a statement considering how long their games have been on the market. Does this mean that all developers should go to the PC exclusively? Probably not. It does, however, poke some holes in the common assumption, one I’ve made myself from time to time, that consoles are a fast dash to pay day. It probably also helps that Steam presents all of it’s new releases on it’s front page. That’s great exposure as anyone who goes to Steams page will see the game right away.

I think this also has alot to do with the market they are targeting. I think it could be realistically argued that the RPG genre is mostly a PC audience. Many of the ‘big hitter’ rpg titles started on the PC and were exclusively PC up until recently.

With many of the former big PC players leaving the PC market we are seeing more and more Indie PC titles popping up on steam. Could this mean that PC is a better platform for them? Perhaps. Sales figures and time will tell the true story. In the case of Zeboyd games the conclusion seems rather obvious. I